Them headlines are tricky, pt. 2

Um, yeah. None of this either. It always helps to make sure your teammates are on task. Here is someone explaining how it all happened. Blast those tricky drop systems!

"Well, I need to lead with this, friends.

I am currently on vacation and already feel like I had left my colleagues to battle this volleyball beast without one of their front-line soldiers. ... But more importantly, I want to be careful in this post so as to respect the circumstances surrounding this mistake, and not jump to conclusions.

With that setup, here's the story.

We have four editions per night, and we are paginated in Harris. And for archiving purposes, each page must be unique to its edition.

In other words, when the first edition is finished, all its pages are copied over and given second edition names. You make a change on a first edition page after that deadline, and it just sits there.

That's the context, so here's now the mistake happened:

The design on this page, with dummy text, wrapped up at roughly 5 p.m.

The page was sent for the first edition with the mistake, at roughly 6:45 p.m. The dummy text had not been replaced with the actual headlines/cutlines.

The first editions came off the presses, the mistakes were caught and fixed for the second edition. A correct page was proofed and sent for second edition at 11:10 p.m. The desk breathed a collective sigh of relief. Not great to have such a glaring error in the first edition, but that's 10,000 papers and we circulate 200,000.

* But here's where it went from bad-but-ok to bad-to-worse:

SOME TIME BEFORE THE FIXES HAD BEEN MADE TO THE SECOND EDITION, the incorrect page from earlier was copied over to the third edition in our Harris Newsmaker pagination system.

The third edition deadline (12:35) came, and the mistake page got sent blindly. Then the fourth and final/metro edition deadline (1:45) came, and the mistake page was sent blindly.

If you're keeping score, that's an amazing chain of mistakes:

* Dummy text typed into story.
* Headlines not updated for first edition
* Mistake page copied to later editions too soon; corrections negated for all but one edition (second).
* Third and fourth editions not proofed, and earlies off the presses weren't proofed, as the assumption was the mistake had been taken care of by 11:10.

On our desk (designers design pages with dummy text; editors write headlines and cutlines separately; paginators -- not designers -- flow in the correct text, headlines and cutlines; proofers check pages) it's impossible to point this to one person. A lot had to happen.

Cast tritely, it's a lesson in proofing.

Cast with humanity in the equation, it's a lesson in communication, in fallibility, in understanding how a system works and a reminder that everyone has a role in preserving accuracy."